How businesses interact with the MySpace community.
MySpace has become known essentially everywhere. MySpace truly is its own brand. This level of notoriety might initially seem to be a positive for MySpace itself, but further consideration could suggest otherwise. Popularity can quickly turn to public disinterest and even resentment. This may be due to some form of envy factor, or it may just be due to people growing tired of being exposed to some recurring brand.
MySpace at one time was a hang out for teens mostly, but since then MySpace has received every form of media coverage. The media came and told MySpace's story to millions of people throughout the world. This after all is the function of the media. The appearance of the media in MySpace land however may have given core MySpace users the impression that their territory had been intruded upon, and even sold out to mainstream interests.
The feeling of MySpace going corporate may have left a particularly significant impression on MySpace users. At one time, mega companies Burger King and WalMart had MySpace profiles. Both profiles have since been abandoned and at least in WalMart’s particular case their MySpace profile seems to have been removed in response to bad publicity. It seems many MySpace users were not happy with WalMart’s presence on MySpace, and expressed as much through harsh comments left on WalMart’s MySpace profile. So the profile is now gone.
The WalMart scenario may have been a lesson not just that for that company, but for MySpace as well. MySpace has apparently been surpassed in popularity by Facebook, the networking site explicitly for students. Is this due to the general feeling that MySpace had become overrun and corrupted by commercial interests? It’s certainly a valid possibility. It’s notable that Facebook does show advertising, but under the Facebook format corporate profiles are not allowed: not yet anyway. Perhaps users of any online site have accepted seeing advertising, but not the notion of embracing advertisers as regular members of the community.
All of this isn’t to suggest that MySpace is now somehow irrelevant: there are still hundreds of millions of MySpace profiles, and almost certainly millions and millions of MySpace members. But if there is something to be taken from the response to corporate presences on MySpace it may be that business sites should be presented with a light touch and without an obvious motivation to increase sales or to generate publicity. As with any other community, becoming an accepted part of MySpace takes time and a respectful effort.
